My last day at Penn, my first day at WebdevStudios
This past summer I started attending the Philly WordPress meetups, which led to an opportunity for me to speak at Philly WordCamp, which led to an amazing opportunity to work at WebDevStudios, with an amazing team. Today – Monday – was my first day on the job. I’m doing custom development work and soon I’ll get involved with project management. I’m starting with some enhancements to Baja.com. Friday was my last day at Penn, so my head is spinning a bit from the transition.
I’ve been part of the web team in Penn’s School of Medicine since 2004, and I’ve been Director for the past 2 years. My team had a lot of demands placed on them, with the need for projects outpacing what we could provide. One of the first things I did as Director was learn Agile practices so I could teach them to my team (and I brought in a scrum coach to help). These two graphics illustrate the two primary challenges we faced – not enough staff, and too much chaos:
Blue represents available SOMIS staff, red indicates how many people would be needed to complete the desired work
Illustration by Esther Derby showing a not very well functioning development processFor many months my work spilled over into nights and weekends as I tried to move things forward. I can’t say we entirely solved these problems, but we made a lot of progress, and got the wheels turning in higher levels of administration to address the situation (“turning the aircraft carrier,” as one of our project managers put it – change is not easy to implement in a huge institution). Deciding to leave was hard, but an opportunity to turn my WordPress plugin development hobby into a job, to work with Brad (@williamsba) and the WebDevStudios team, and having the flexibility of working at home… it was too good to pass up. I’m especially looking forward to having more time to code again. If the past 2 years have taught me anything, it’s that I have a passion for software development, and always striving to do it better.